Uncovering the Past

Stiebing's concise, wonderfully vivid, engrossing history conveys a sense of archeology as a great collective adventure by which humanity retrieves its past. Heinrich Schliemann's excavation of the Troy of Homer's Iliad, Arthur Evans's reconstruction of Minoan Crete, John Stephens's discovery of Mayan pyramids in Mexico and Austen Layard's remarkably swift location of Assyrian palaces are a few of the many phenomenal exploits recounted in a narrative that emphasizes advances in archeological techniques and methods. Stiebing, a professor of archeology at the University of New Orleans, reviews the mystery of immense prehistoric mounds in the Ohio Valley. His chronicle also encompasses India's carved cave temples at Ellora, advanced medieval cities of sub-Saharan Africa, finds in China, Indonesia and Cambodia, and underwater archeology. Stiebing dispassionately reviews the controversy surrounding the ``new archeology,'' which uses computers and statistics in its quest to discover the laws of cultural dynamics. Illustrated. (Mar.)